Seeing the World for what it is
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Web browser, Futures, Internet on
In “The Graduate” Robert De Niro was given one word of career advice: Plastics.
After this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference I’ve got one word for all of you out there: Visualisation.
We’re being faced with more and more complex data sources that we need to turn into something useful. There’s a huge amount of raw data out there, in company reports, in scientific data and in the millions of words that fill the Internet (and our hard disks). The question is, how can we avoid drowning in this information?
The answer is simple - providing tools that can be used to give easy access to the information that’s there, and along with managing that data and mining it, and then making it easy to display the information graphically. Presenter after presenter at ETech showed off various graphs and visualisations that helped make sense of the information they were working with.
One example came from the team at design company Stamen. Working with the folk at MySociety they’d produced a map of London that mixed and mashed transport times with house prices. All you needed to do was move the sliders to find an area that met your budget and the time you want to get up. Their demo also showed how housing prices flowed across the San Francisco Bay area, and how they bubbled up and down in Texas sub-divisions.
Another presentation, from Saul Griffith, used visualisation to put his personal carbon footprint in perspective - and how it matched to his personal energy budget. The graphs and diagrams he’d produced meant that it was easy for him to decide where he needed to cut back - and how the cut backs could be linked to changes he was meaning to make in his life anyway.
Paul Torrens is using visualisation techniques to model the behaviouir of crowds. With 3D models and animations he’s able to show how people exit a building in an emergency, and how a demonstration becomes a riot. Using the information from his simulations architects can design safer buildings, along with cities that can reduce the risks of a peaceful demonstration becoming something else - and protecting the peaceful majority that are just trying to avoid being caught up in clashes between police and people just along for the fight.
These folk are the “alpha geeks”. They may have more of a grasp of what they’re looking for in the data than most of us, but they’re using the tools we already have. Data analysed in Excel can become a web 2.0 mashup or a set of well designed PowerPoint slides. We can use these techniques to visualise data ourselves, building dashboards of the information that we need or want.
There is one danger here: it’s very easy to trust the visualisations that someone else has made. Are they manipulating the data to give the results they want? The only answer is to learn how to visualise complex data ourselves, becoming adept at manipulating and merging information in our chosen tools. Tools like Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services are key to this, as is getting to grips with Excel’s Business Intelligence features.
It’s a brave new world. Let’s take advantage of it.
–Simon
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